Chivalry Is Dead

By James Atlas

ARTHUR REX:

A LEGENDARY NOVEL

by Thomas Berger Delacorte;

499 pages; $10.95

The legends of King Arthur are a natural subject for novelists. T.H. White produced an eloquent contemporary version in The Once and Future King, and only two years ago, the late John Steinbeck's dull but competent retelling of Le Morte d'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory's 15th century compilation, was published. Now Thomas Berger offers still another rex redux, in the form of "a legendary novel." He might have done better to call it a haphazard parody.

In his earlier novels, Berger proved himself a fine minor portraitist of the hapless, tough-talking American male: the middleclass, victimized hero of the Reinhart trilogy, the used-car salesmen and small-time gangsters in Sneaky People. Little Big Man, his burlesque epic of the wild West, and Who Is Teddy Villanova?, a brilliant imitation of the private-eye novel, displayed a notable talent for satire.

Arthur Rex features hard-boiled knights in a pseudo-Arthurian landscape, and the clash of styles has the discordant ring of crossed lances at a joust. His heroes talk obsessively of "paps" and "mammets" (not, as Berger supposes, a variant of mammaries, but a medieval reference to Muhammad). The labored effort to reproduce Malory's diction is a disaster. Horses are "sore thirsty," kings are "some vexed," lusty knights "swyve" damsels, addressed elsewhere as "chicks." Launcelot is said to have "filled a need for the queen," a disheartening summation of one of the world's most fabled love affairs.

Berger's borrowings from Le Morte d'Arthur are eccentric. At times, he hovers close to the celebrated tale of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, chronicling their legendary exploits, the magical interventions of Merlin and the quest for the Holy Grail. But his treatment of the romances between Tristram and Isold, Launcelot and Guinevere reads like a medieval version of Couples. Querulous and selfabsorbed, the lovers are made to suffer the mutual incomprehension of male chauvinists and radical feminists. "Being a woman," the author says of Guinevere, "she could not understand honor and justice, for they were invented by men." The code of chivalry is resurrected in the form of propaganda. Berger is given to writing didactic speeches, and his digressions about good and evil, appropriate for the allegorical literature of the Middle Ages, seem tedious in a contemporary novel.

Still, the tales of Camelot are dramatic no matter who tells them. The somber denouement, in which the mortally wounded Arthur restores his invincible sword to the mysterious Lady of the Lake, possesses a grandeur undiminished by familiarity. Aware of the story's inherent drama, Berger eventually abandons farce in favor of a simple, unadorned narrative. "All men of that time lived and died by legend," he notes with uncharacteristic fervor, and his homage to those legends is a relief after the showy wit that dominates so many chapters. -- James Atlas

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